Finally bored, she rummaged for something interesting in the valise. Clues to Ara seemed to come and go in this pile. Even the documents seemed to shift around. She found a small piece of paper, shaped as if sliced by a knife from a larger page. She pulled it out and held it up to catch the strobe light of a passing bridge. The paper contained a bit of verse:
A rather simple and affected halfling limerick, she thought, barely qualifying as a riddle. Of no magical significance or power whatsoever. All in all, a trifling thing.
Or was it? It was, after all, a vow, something far weightier than a promise. Whoever “each to the other” were, it was theirs. Cadence pondered whom in the world “they” could be. Ara? The one called The Bearer? In this pile of scrap it was doubtful she would ever know.
The train slowed and came to rest in a maze of tracks and warehouses. It lurched and stopped, again and again, as if queuing in an unruly line of racehorses at the starting gate. Liquid metal slams cascaded along its length. It rolled forward and gained speed.
Soon enough, the sun was setting in the ocean, far beyond Topanga and the quiet and shuttered remnants of the Mirkwood Forest. That place receded from her mind as evening shadows swept forward over the shoulder of the train. Her view flew past the dusty tracksides of San Bernardino. The country was thinning out.
The neighbor across the aisle had not returned.
She watched with the pensiveness of one accepting the lockdown of a slow journey while other events ran at full speed. The train rumbled on, finally approaching its maximum velocity. Cadence opened one of her grandfather’s journals, one she had packed after thumbing through it and finding that a part of it had been written on a train. Her attention was diverted, though, with a whoosh of air compression. Looking up, she saw a long row of salvaged doors riffling by, very close by the train. Hundreds of doors, it seemed, were all nailed side by side to make an endless color-chip fence, a bright sampler book of discarded gates to unknown lives.
As she watched the kaleidoscope of doors pass by, she thought of the many houses she had lived in. All the bedrooms and bathrooms … and back doors.
The procession ended abruptly with a de-whoosh and a return to slightly more open spaces. She thumbed through the journal, put a bookmark at one spot, and fell into a ragged, dreamless sleep.
An unwelcome consciousness came to her, stiff and crumpled. Bleary, gray, morning light fused with atonal flatness so that all land and sky were a single-hued haze. The Great Salt Lake stretched off to the north. A porter came by with coffee. It was hot and cheap and surprisingly good. She set it on the next seat’s tray table and opened the journal again. Each page or so had a heading and entries in her grandfather’s jittery script, etched with different instruments — pencils, exhausted Bics, fine-lined points of apparent pedigree. Finally she found the entry she was looking for:
Lakeside Ballroom, June 12 ’74
Hopped off the D&RGW last night. Slept in dry culvert on the ROW. Saw strange building mile or so off toward the lake. Went over and found huge abandoned resort and ballroom, maybe from the 1920s. Then at the shoreline, now stranded half mile inland. Looks funny there, standing on huge pilings. 20 foot ceilings, 3 stories. Grand staircase all gray and forlorn and crusted and scary as hell. Easy to get lost in there. Always sounds going on. Birds fluttering in and out. Wind moving non-stop, like an off-key organ with only a few pipes left. Echoing so the sound is amplified. Old boards clapping somewhere in the wind. Put it all together and it’s like ghost music resonating eternally from past revelry.
Too sad for me. I hoofed back out and caught this westbound. Am huddled inside a firewood boxcar now. Snug here, writing by slats of light. Vienna sausage for lunch.
She watched the lakebed stretch away as minutes and miles clacked by. There! That had to be it! Coming up and passing by in the distance was a pile of burned timbers and a high framework of tottered concrete beams. Those gray-black remnants had to be the ruins of the Saltair Pavilion. It was used as a set in the 1965 cult film Carnival of Souls. That, along with The Cabinet of Dr. Calagari, were her favorite progenitors of zombie movies.
OK, she thought, that right there touches it. Everything so damn academic with me. No substance, just the look, the special effects, the trivia. Life as just a movie to watch. The image but not the touch. The picture but not the danger. The illusion, but not the magic. Her mind wouldn’t stop.
Worse yet, I’m just a trained observer, a student of, what, movie history? Pop art? Comics? God help me, television? I’m really just a librarian, an archives clerk. How far removed from life can you get?
Well, maybe it’s not removed at all because, to quote somebody, that’s all there is. If you don’t believe in magic, all you’ll ever see is the pragmatic, maybe spiced with a few cheap tricks for entertainment. After all, that’s why they call them “shows.”
Her mother’s voice came to her, timbre-perfect: “Two generations of romantic misfits. That’s the men in this family!” That voice was imbued with yearning for a touch of normalcy that marriage never dealt her.
The voice echoed away as the train wailed out a long whistle, decelerating to the station stop in Salt Lake.
She reopened her grandfather’s journal at a bookmark:
Montana summertime with high cumulus ranges and big blue-sky days to knock your eyes out. I’m looking at this good luck charm given to me this week. I did a favor for a man who needed help. The favor’s not important now, though it was important to him. He searched me out and said maybe he’d give me a blanket, but that was too easy. Then he said maybe a beaver skin, which could have magic aplenty but was too heavy to lug around. Then he said he had something that was just right. He knew, he said, because his father was a shaman. He’d been off the rez too long, but he said he still knew what it was all about. So he gave me this thing. Said it was good luck if I used it, but serious back luck if I didn’t use it and keep it sacred. “Not like rabbits’ feet where you can take em’ or leave em’. You got to be one with this,” he said.
I told him I wanted to give it back to him, but he said that was also bad luck.
Then he leaned very close. “Not only do you got to use it, you got to change your ways.” I dreaded what he was gonna say next. “Your spirit is lost. You got to quit wandering like a man with no home.”
Maybe someday I will. But that’s a scarier thought than hitching rides right now. I’ll keep this thing safe and maybe pass it on. If I ever get home again, that is.
Anyway, I’m sitting in a truck stop, just finished eating lemon pie, and I’m looking this thing over. It looks kinda special. It’s ivory and it’s old. Looks like a tooth from a giant bear maybe, back when bears were twice as big as they are now. Maybe like Alaskan bears in the museum except beefed up even more. There’s a spot for a hole to be drilled and a key chain, if I had any keys. I’ll keep it and hope my luck doesn’t sour. I sure as hell can’t let go of it now. I guess whoever has it has to figure out the truth it’s trying to say. Even if, like me, they know bad luck is their own damn fault.